Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In an example of the sort of shameless marketeer behaviour with we loathe, fear and high approve of, Cliffski of Positech has celebrated the just-announced opportunity to choose our evil masters for the next few years and/or until a mid-00s Fascist Putsch by putting his Democracy 2 on sale. Just for today, it’s 50% off if you enter the code, meaning you can pretend to do a better job than any of the actual candidates in the comfort of your own whatever-room-where-your-PC-lives. Press release follows…
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There’s something hugely depressing about tower defence games. I’m not just talking about that crushing, opaque sense of failure that arrives with each penetration of your meticulous defenses. It’s more the unshakable feeling that you’re wasting your time- perhaps because so much of your time with them is spent watching wave after wave crash pointlessly against your towers. Thank goodness, then, that a fellow by the name of David Wilson has made a pretty interesting tower defence/action hybrid freeware game called drone that actually manages to be even more depressing.
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The tropical environment, not the music. The music, in fact, is that BA-DA-DA BA-DA-DA orchestral stuff that means ACTION is about to occur. The Sniper: Ghost Warrior trailer claims that the footage is created using the game engine, but the trailer is nevertheless FMV, presumably showing how the game is meant to be understood. You’re a sniper, you shoot people from far away. There’s a chance it will be awemazing, I suppose, depending on the craft of the long-distance shooty, but it’s being developed by City Interactive, who don’t have the very best track record with such things. Anyway, it’s looking superficially fancy, so go take a peek.
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Final Demo does make this sound somewhat ominous, as Kunos Simulazioni know something that none of us does. Let’s spare no further thought for imminent Armageddon – because it’s too late to do anything about that now – and go straight to linking this demo version (which can apparently be unlocked to the full thing). More details on netKar’s site. In short: a simulation with more details. The latest footage I could find of the open Beta is beneath the cut…
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MMORPG.com have the full hour of the MMO panel from PAX East up over here. There’s some interesting stuff in there, but the first question kind of wrong-foots the whole thing and makes the panel seem out of touch: “Why are there no sports MMOs?” asks one of the audience. The panel come up with a few reasons, and says that stuff will happen “in the future”, but the truth is there are already some sports MMOs: Empire Of Sports, Football Superstars, Freestyle Street Basketball, Project Powder, then there’s the inevitable browser-based stuff like Football Manager Online, or the American Football management MMO, Goal Line Blitz.

I can’t really blame the panel for not knowing about this stuff because I think it’s illustrative of how wide the MMO space is now. That the traditional subs-based fantasy-MMO teams aren’t in touch with the rest of the material out there just goes to show that there’s more information whirling around the “MMO” now than anyone is able to process. Hell, most MMO developers have never played Eve (of the ones I have met, anyway.)

We haven’t spoke about Plain Sight since its Open Beta early last year. Beatnik game retreated, got back to work and are finally ready to release. As in, as we speak. To celebrate the event we thought it time to talk to Beatnik’s Robin Lacey about the long road to Plain Sight’s release…
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Picked up via the ever awesome TIGSource, here’s an English translation of a Skipmore jRPG parody. Synopsis Quest is basically 25-individual episodes which basically the main story beats of a huge chunk of jRPGs. Each one is an individual puzzle, normally based around subverting expectations. It’s mostly affectionate. Mostly. If you get stuck, there’s a video play through below.
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Considering RPS’ wandering remit, I’m surprised that we haven’t actually written anything about Farmville. Especially as Jim’s good lady is a player. Let’s hand over to Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson, whose Farmville diaries sees her grow from someone who really can’t see the point to someone who self-describes themselves as a drug-pusher. As she concludes: “Here’s the thing: whether they’re right or wrong, you can’t ignore 85 million people.” She has a point. Go read and… well, I’m sure you’ll have things to say about Farmville, but try and keep them polite. The 85 million a month is the interesting number, innit? 350 million people log onto Facebook a month, according to Facebook’s COO. So just under 1 in 4 people Facebook people actively play Farmville. My gut-level cynicism makes me raises an eyebrow at that. Only on a personal anecdotal level, far, far less than 1-in-4 people are playing Farmville on my friends list. I’d love to see region-by-region breakdown on their numbers.

There are now a whole bunch of Official RPS communities rumbling away in the depths of the multiplayer internet, and I wanted to flag some of them up here. First up there’s our Steam group, which has around 4000 members and occasionally orchestrates events for various games, including Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Join up, and we’ll get more stuff going. We do, of course, have a TF2 group here, and there are now US and UK Battlefield servers. (Search “Rock” in the server browser is the easiest way to bring them up.) We also have an official RPS Eve corporation, RPS Holdings, which you can easily find in game via their CEO Eben Rochelle. They’re a fun bunch with lots of veterans able to give out advice.

Finally, you can hit the forum over here, where there is Bloodbowl and some other stuff happening, or just start asking people for a game of something you fancy in the relevant comments. There are hundreds of thousands of RPS readers out there, and some of them probably want to play multiplayer Sacrifice or something… now there’s an idea.

See also Rock, Paper, Satan and the RPS Dwarf Fortress Group.

I kept on meaning to Sunday Paper this, but seeing the amount of actual content in, I think it deserves a post. A year on from the controversial talking point of 2009, Tale of Tales do a really elaborate postmortem of their work. As well as the traditional look at the work itself, there’s individual essays about each of the girls and their respective wolves. Lots of stuff to look at, in short, all showing the passion which Tale of Tales brought to the work. Central linking page is here. They’ve since closed the blog, and plan to close-to-disappear for the next eighteen months to work on two new projects. Good luck to ‘em.

Sunday are for writing too long first-link-post so not having enough room for a proper intro. List of good words. Must not link to pop.

• I was going to link to this piece by the Superbrothers over at BoingBoing last week as a singular discussion piece. You may have seen it already, but if not, go have a look. Less Talk, More Rock argues that games’ natural language isn’t spoken or written, but in the doing, both on the creation and the playing side. It’s easy to see it as a games-purist argument… but while it overlaps with it, I’m not entirely sure that’s right. The games it hails – Another World, Prince of Persia – are actually both most noteworthy in how they reduced the pure-game element, in favour of in-game narrative cut-scenes. With retrospect, we look at them as narrative classics… but that’s not how they were taken at the time. These were games which didn’t rock hard enough for at least a good chunk of the gamers – which lead to Flashback’s more game-heavy approach to similar terrain. This is, of course, both a strength and weakness of the argument, depending how you want to spin it. I also note that it’s a vague enough manifesto so that everyone just lumps their favourite games inside it. Still – it’s a more subtle argument than it initially appears, even though I suspect the “rock” terminology doesn’t help with that. Thoughts, folk?

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